The Prison in Twelve Landscapes

More people are imprisoned in the United States at this moment than in any other time or place in history, yet the prison itself has never felt further away or more out of sight. The Prison in Twelve Landscapes is a film about the prison in which we never see a penitentiary.

“Arranges a series of oblique, geographical vignettes into an unsettling mural of systemic damage.” – Jeannette Catsoulis, New York Times

Instead, the film unfolds as a cinematic journey through a series of landscapes across the USA where prisons do work and affect lives, from a California mountainside where female prisoners fight raging wildfires, to a Bronx warehouse full of goods destined for the state correctional system, to an Appalachian coal town betting its future on the promise of prison jobs. (Dir. by Brett Story, 2016, Canada/USA, 90mins., Not Rated)